Hi, podcast listeners. This week, to the best of our knowledge, is collaborating with The Conversation, an independent news and analysis site to bring you talks with academic researchers that reframe events in the news.

I'm Anne Strange Shamps, and this week, it seemed like all anybody was talking about, was that recording that surfaced of Donald Trump making some fairly disgusting

remarks about women. He says,

This was locker room talk. I'm not proud of it. I apologize to my family. I apologize to the American people. Certainly I'm not proud of it.

But this is locker room talk. You know, when we have a world...

Locker room talk.

That's code, right?

For a certain kind of macho, sexual braggadocho, guys talking about women as a bunch of body parts.

And what's implied is that inside a secret world of segregated man spaces, locker rooms, clubhouses, men's rooms,

this is normal. It's just how guys talk. Well, a whole bunch of NFL and NBA players this week

have been tweeting that that's not how anybody talks in their locker rooms. So why do we think

that's true? Maybe, because that's the

message we give boys and girls in places like sex ed classes. There's one thing I find particularly

problematic, which I often have heard repeated, is this sort of notion that boys and men think of

sex every few seconds, and they get taught this.

So what if you don't? Like what if you're a young boy and you don't do that? You think like,

oh, I'm supposed to. This is Amy Shalett. She's a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst,

and she has done hundreds of interviews about teen sexuality with boys, parents, and sex ed teachers, both here in the U.S. and in other countries.

There's a real assumption in the U.S. of kind of a battle between the sexes where boys just want sex and girls just want love.

What's even more surprising, though, is that when we look at what American boys actually

want, they seem to be far more romantic than popular stereotypes, and they are far more interested

in relationships and love than we assume, but they often think they're alone. They think that most

...